Wednesday, November 11, 2015

The Befuddled Warlock

“Obama’s
presidency has been a wager that we live in a rational world where other major
powers will follow their interests, too. That’s certainly the premise of
Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s nuclear deal with Iran and his new attempt
to start a peace process in Syria.”

Then, he contends that

“Obama knows his
belief in rationality is hard to square with human history. As he said in his
2009 Nobel Peace Prize address, “Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.
A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations
cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force
may sometimes be necessary… is a recognition of history; the imperfections of
man and the limits of reason.”

Only to conclude by saying that

“Obama has
sometimes fired blanks in his foreign policy. But he’s shooting at the right
target.”

There several things that require
some additional clarification here:

* Obama’s blanks (pun
unintended) have helped break up a country, strengthened and legitimate two
major imperialist powers (Russia and Iran), and hastened the demise of the
global order without offering any alternative.

* But Obama’s problematic behavior
in the realm of foreign policy cannot be simply reduced to the issue of firing
blanks. There is more to that. There is something inherently wrong in Obama’s
basic view of the nature of the world we live in, and of what it means to be
rational. First of all, ideology and traditional modes of belonging are still
relevant in many parts of our contemporary world, and tends to shape the
motives of the peoples involved and color their understanding, elites and
masses alike, of otherness and of what constitutes a basic interest. People can
behave very rationally even while motivated by any number of irrational
ideological beliefs, but that does not mean that we live in a rational world or
that we can agree on a specific definition of what constitutes interest.

* Since Obama
acknowledges the existence of evil, and the limits of nonviolence when people
like Hitler are involved, and since he is obviously not a moron, he should have
foreseen how the nonviolent protest movement against Assad would fare. Still,
he did nothing to prevent the mayhem we are witnessing today. Why? Because for
all his self-righteousness and all his eruditeness, he didn’t think it’s any of
his business. But now that the country is irrevocably broken and we have
IS/Daesh controlling major swaths of it, and Iraq, and metastasizing
everywhere, intervention has somehow become a must, and much more complicated
than it would have been.

What manner of leader is a
man with poor prognostic skills and no foresight?

Even when Obama and his acolytes
diagnosed some problems correctly, they still ended up adopting the wrong
policies, because there was something inherently wrong with their basic
assumptions about the world.

Still I do agree with the
assertion that Obama’s critics on the right are often disingenuous. For judging
by their statements on foreign policy, it’s clear that many of them would have
adopted similar or even worse courses of action, e.g. Rand Paul, Donald Trump,
Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

But his critics on the left have
been spot on. Take this
article by Steven Heydemann, a political scientist who specializes in the
comparative politics and the political economy of the Middle East, with a
particular focus on Syria, and a very good friend of mine. In his article,
Heydemann argues that

“The
authoritarian stabilization pact between Russia, Iran, and Syria that has kept
Bashar al-Assad in power offers a stark example of an emerging international
landscape in which democracies will find their room for maneuver increasingly
constrained. Existing international institutions, notably the UN Security
Council, have proven inadequate to respond to the challenges posed by the rise
of such transnational authoritarian networks. Without a coordinated effort
among democracies to overcome the institutional paralysis that has prevented
decisive international action in cases like Syria, including formal legal
standing for norms such as the Responsibility to Protect, democracies will find
themselves at a significant disadvantage in resolving major regional and
international conflicts, even as they—along with millions of Syrians—are
compelled to bear the growing adjustment costs imposed by an increasingly
polarized international order.”

So, as a result of this major
failure by democracies to coordinate their policies, at a time when autocracies
are busy honing their coordination skills, diplomatic efforts such as the
Vienna Meetings meant to resolve the Syrian conflict are meaningless, because
they are designed to fail, and to be used as cover to advance
undemocratic agendas at the expense of creating more misery for Syrians, among
other peoples. Indeed,

“Such diplomatic
dissembling would be easy to dismiss if it were not part and parcel of a
larger, intensely coercive and deeply destabilizing effort to ensure the
survival of the Assad regime; assert a rigid, absolutist conception of state
sovereignty designed to insulate autocrats from accountability; contain the
ability of democracies to act in support of populations that resist
authoritarian repression; and advance authoritarian ambitions to weaken the
institutions of global governance established as a check against precisely the
kind of genocidal acts in which the Assad regime is complicit.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World